Hal Weber, onetime crusading journalist, is summoned to Copper City by his old flame Rust after the death of her husband, mining magnate and political heavyweight Arthur "Buck" Masson. As editor of The Express, a newspaper with an anti-Masson stance secretly owned by Rust, Hal is drawn back to her even as he falls for her stepdaughter Audrey. The situation in Copper City soon literally becomes explosive, with Hal having to choose between Rust and Audrey, the bottle and his conscience, safety and the truth.

Drake traces the history of long-form comics, including the 1949 creation of It Rhymes with Lust.

Indexer Notes

Afterword copyright 2007 Arnold Drake per indicia. Excerpts are woodcuts from Masereel's Private Journey, published in 1919 as Mon livre d'heures; a page from Kurtzman's 1959 Jungle Book; a page from Eisner's 1979 A Contract with God; the cover to the 1963 edition of Gross' He Done Her Wrong; and a sequence from Metzger's 1976 Beyond Time and Again. Copyright is attributed for all excerpts, which were reduced for publication.